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Gamasutra
October 15 2008

Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress

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Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress

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[When building a great game development team, how do you keep everyone on track? Game HR veteran Marc Mencher continues his in-progress Gamasutra series, discussing how to meet goals and reward top employees.]

Set and Maintain Team Standards

A team is made up of individuals who perform unique tasks, and when combined, produce a finished product that is greater than the sum of its parts. You want team members to do their best and be ready to help others, so you need to promote a sense of cohesion; the team will only succeed if everyone works together. Your team should be able to generate their own tasks, tackle problems, agree on solutions and implement their decisions with confidence.

Challenge perceived assumptions to improve team productivity and effectiveness:

  • "Problems and their solutions are always isolated." Being part of the solution sounds trite but it works.
  • "Quality comes expensive." Improving quality makes sense measured against the direct (and indirect) costs of failure.
  • "Tackling the symptom cures the disease." Problems will recur if not addressed at the root level.
  • "No one cares." Whether upper management cares or not, the team has to care, or the results will suffer.

Conduct Regular Team Reviews

Review your team's progress regularly to help them define and refine specific aspects. Regular team reviews can be conducted by the entire team or by key team members. Use them to check team performance against team objectives and valid comparisons like the competition. Make sure work methods are on track and be ready to make changes as needed.

  • Be sure that the entire team is aware of individual responsibility and is challenged (positively) by their work.
  • Inspire team members to contribute their best to both the team and the task at hand.
  • Oversee work practices to ensure everyone is working toward a common goal.
  • Assess and revise goals to motivate the team.
  • Watch for overlap between team and individual responsibilities that cause redundancy.

Choose Appropriate Measurements

Life is easier when all of the measurements of your productivity are laid out before you. In the game world, this can be as simple as putting a new game in your Xbox 360 and checking out what the Achievements are. In order to improve your Gamerscore, you will need to complete various tasks throughout the game, but having a look before hand will certainly open your eyes to some things you may want to do to rack up points and impress your friends.

Without knowing these objectives beforehand, you could pass up on various encounters that were all part of the complete game experience. Unfortunately, in the real world, you don't have the option to pass up on various milestones or skip steps, so be clear to identify everything that will need to go into the game from the get-go.

When you're analyzing team performance, use an objective, quantitative measurement system. Outline a system of metric goals that analyze quality, quantity and cost effectiveness.

For instance, if a call center team is measured only by the number of calls handled per hour, response quality will probably suffer. Setting a quota of calls per hour, a wait time target, monitoring a percentage of calls and surveying customer satisfaction by making follow-up calls is a more effective way of measuring team performance and treats the team as if they were individuals instead of automated answerbots.

WHO IS BEING MEASURED?

WHAT CAN BE MEASURED?

Team as a whole: Overall progress vs. budgets, schedules, milestones and goals

Finance: Actual costs vs. projections
Time: Milestones completed vs. schedule
Development: Investment in team training
Quality: Accuracy and customer satisfaction

Leader: Your ability to provide support, direction, mentoring, etc.

Control: Achievements vs. budget and morale
Team: Rating by the team members
Management: Rating by superiors
External: Rating by customers and/or suppliers

Subgroup: Effectiveness of each subgroup as a unit and as part of the overall team

Finance: Actual costs vs. projections
Time: Milestones completed vs. schedule
Development: Investment in team training
Quality: Accuracy and customer satisfaction (including other subgroups)

Individual: Effectiveness and contributions of each individual on personal merit, as part of a subgroup and part of the overall team.

Output: Performance vs. target goals
Appraisal: Rating by superiors, peers and customers
Self-Appraisal: Accuracy and honest of self-evaluation vs. actual performance
Added Value: Contribution(s) outside specific goals and assigned tasks


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Comments


ken sato 15 Oct 2008 at 3:48 pm PST
Good article and I like the feed back / analysis questions. Tried to implement something like this but received a lot of resistance as it was perceived to be too "touchy - feely". Yeesh.

Tim Carter 15 Oct 2008 at 6:15 pm PST
Just remember to not get so wrapped up building a great game team you forget to focus on creating a great *game*...

Matt Ponton 16 Oct 2008 at 2:28 am PST
Nice one Marc!

Vladimir Neskovic 17 Oct 2008 at 4:24 am PST
Great article.
I would like to add my 5 cents especially on brainstorming, which is a frequent buzzword not only in our industry.
Brainstorming is only one in plethora of techniques used for creative problem solving. And it is only used in one of the six convergent phases of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process. It is important to mention that bRAINSTORMING was “invented” by the same person who “invented” the CPS process, a great mind, Alex Osborn. Those who tried CPS process are aware how powerful it may be.
Nowadays we may find cca. 10-15 derivates of the original Brainstorming techniques (nominal, superhero, negative brainstorming,…) which are more efficient then the original one. It is good to be familiar with as much as possible derivates since the fact that original brainstorming works effectively only for a short period of time with the same group of people. Btw Wikipedia offers nice article on what, where, how, who, … on Brainstorming.

Being creative and inventive in our industry is a core competence to most of our employers. In my opinion too much buzz was used for only one technique while neglecting all other important phases as problem (re)definition, exploration, solution planning and execution or other hundreds of techniques used in other phases of CPS.








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